2016 review: Part 2: Reading

Posted January 16, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in General, Ramblings / 0 Comments

There was a time when I read 100+ books a year. In 2012, it was 108, and I also had time to review them all, write series reviews and compose long, detailed essays about my reading-related thoughts. In 2013, I read 91 books. In 2014, the year I published the first of my own books, it was 61, then 57 in 2015. In 2016 it was just 46, and that included a month in Australia with my Kindle, and a whole shedload of long-haul flights. This is the trouble with writing — it eats away at my reading time. And that also means that I have to be more selective with what I read, and I tend to be less experimental. Out come the tried-and-trusted authors, whose work I know I’ll enjoy. And the effect of that is that my average rating on Goodreads has risen from 3.3 stars to 3.8 stars.

So there will be no best-of list, and no self-published gems this year because they would look remarkably like last year’s. Instead a few statistics.

1) Genres:

  • Fantasy: 16 (35%)
  • Regency: 16 (35%)
  • Other: 14 (30%)

The ‘Other’ category includes murder mystery, literary and the stuff my book group makes me read. The Regency is a consequence of writing my own Regency romances. I’ve started a full reread of all Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, and I’ve also started a list of more modern ‘best-of’ Regencies, compiled by Googling. Lots of the recommended ones were only available in paperback, which sounds as if the publishers are missing a trick, so I was restricted to those available for Kindle. And I picked up the three bestsellers on the day of my list-making, just for comparison.

2) Publishing type:

  • Self-published: 27 (58%)
  • Trade published: 19 (42%)

This is something that shifts a little more towards the self-pubbing end of the spectrum every year. I used to read solely trade pubbed, but now I find them either too expensive or too long or too flashy (by which I mean that they have a stunning one-line hook, but the actual story falls well short of being stunning). Sometimes they’re just unreadably ambitious. A self-pubbed book is more likely, in my experience, to be a good, old-fashioned well-told story.

3) Review rating:

  • 5*: 18 (39%)
  • 4*: 19 (41%)
  • 3*: 7 (15%)
  • 2*: 0
  • 1*: 2 (5%)

The result of my comfort-reading binge is that my average rating for the year is 4.1.

4) Gender balance:

  • Male author: 6 (13%)
  • Female author: 40 (87%)

Yikes! This is what happens when I start rereading Regency romances – all those female authors! I read 16 Regencies in 2016, 7 by Georgette Heyer and 9 others. Even excluding those, male authors were only 25% of the total. Which isn’t intentional by any means, but just part of the switch from longer, trade-pubbed (dominated by male authors) to shorter, self-pubbed.

I’ve never chosen my reading material by the gender of the author, so I don’t suppose this will change much until I move away from romances and back to more varied books. More fantasy! But the real issue is how to find more time to read in the first place. If anyone has an answer to that, please let me know.

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